DysoForums

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

I have zonealarm free weak edition as a firewall, and somehow, it blocks everything I do with NWN. Now, could someone explain me WHY it is blocking an authorised program, and HOW to stop it. Bah.

Oh, and the stopping might be because it tries to connect to another PC(ie. a server)
_________________

Aronthal · Master Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 172

Are you having problems with the server or the client?

The client should not have any problems as long as you authorize it. I've used za with nwn ever since nwn came out.

As for the server; well I haven't used the server for awhile, and when I did run it, it was mostly on linux. The last time I ran it, which was not long after nwn came out, I was never able to get it working with za. You have to open up ports and such, which I was able to do easily enough on my router and iptables (in linux) but za never seemed to cooperate. But new versions of za have come out since then, so this may be fixed now.

One thing about za is that even after you uninstall it, it leaves behind residuals that get in the way. Can't remember what I had to do to completely uninstall it when I was trying to get nnw server to work on XP though.

That probably wasn't too helpfull

ohhh - are you using xp? if so do you still have the xp firewall running? It is fairly limited (I don't use it) and I'm not sure if it is even capable of filtering at the program level (can't remember), but it is possible that it is interfering with za if you have them both running.

ohh and one more thing, I think you have to authorize the client to act as a server as well??

Well that's about it I guess.

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

Welll, the problem only arose a ouple of months ago(never thought about posting about it here before), just when Zonealarm kepot wanting me to get the trial(which I hated, and I think that THAT is probably one of the the reasons it doesn't allow NWN to get through). The problem is indeed with the client, I don't run servers, and I doubt my machine could handle it if I did...

Well, the problem starts off when I want to select a server, or even direct connect, it just can't find the server, because as far as I could tell, it rates the packages sent back by that server to notify it is on-line, as HIGH RISK. So it blocks them, BAH.

And no, I don't run WinXP, I run Win98. I'm very sure it is Zonealarm blocking them, since I checked the logs of ZA. Bah, it's of low quality anyway, and it does dumb things, but it IS the firewall with the least amount of hassle. Unless ofcourse, you can tell me of a free one that gives even less hassle...
_________________

Mogster · Tue 06/03/03 2:00pm

Set ZA's Internet zone to "Medium", it works fine with NWN.

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

Why is a solution always that simple? Damned be me! I always look past simple things. Anyway, thanks,

_________________

Aronthal · Tue 06/03/03 2:26pm

My zone alarm is set to high; and I still have no problems running nwn.

Jon316 · Guest

zonealarm is an OK firewall but there are better, let me see, if you check under security or programs you can allow it a permission to let certain programs though... simply allow it to let NWN have all access at any time and it should allow you to use it, but i believe that the NWN is a seperate thing from the game itself, so you have to configure that appropiately....

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

No, Jon, read what I said, it has access to everything, the problem is that Zonealarm doesn't allow NWN to get access with servers when it's on the HIGH setting. BAH.
_________________

Maelstrom696969 · Lamer Joined: 18 Dec 2002 Posts: 1837

ZoneAlarm can indeed be bad in many situations. I don't think it's *all* bad, but I never recommend it because I've just had too many bad experiences with it. And I fix PC's for a living (for what that's worth).
_________________
"Great warrior? Ah! Wars not make one great!"

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

Could you then point me to another decent firewall? One that's easy to handle, my mother and sister started somplaining about some other one I recently installed....bah.
_________________

Maelstrom696969 · Lamer Joined: 18 Dec 2002 Posts: 1837

Norton is sweet. It once in awhile forgot that I told it to "Always Let Neverwinter Nights Do It's Thing" or whatever, but a simple mouse click and it was fine. Never even touched any of the settings, just installed and ran it, and answered "yes" or "no" whenever something tried accessing the 'Net (and like for NWN you can tell it to always let it happen, or never, then it hopefully won't ask you again).
_________________
"Great warrior? Ah! Wars not make one great!"

Aronthal · Master Joined: 25 Mar 2003 Posts: 172

Until the most recent version of zonealarm I would have to say it was more hassle that it is worth. But I have been pretty happy with the latest version, plus its free!

Conrad Hollows · Har-Rhun Project Leader Joined: 07 Sep 2002 Posts: 2161

Been quite happy with it myself, you just have to take the time to authorize the NWN with internet and server rights, etc. Once it's set up right, it does a pretty bang up job, I think.
_________________
Envision something suitably witty here.

Jon316 · Guest

Unfortunately, ZA doesn't allow you to host a server so you need to disable it to host a game or use the NWNserver because it usually blocks all connection attempts, aka firewall blockage, so just disable it altogether to host, i tried hosting with it on once and got 500 blocks (the maximum it will show) so i was laughing my ass off...

GorbGuy · Guest

Maelstrom696969 · Thu 06/05/03 2:19pm

From now on all my tech questions are going straight to Gorby.

Jon316 · Guest

interesting firewall... it's a keeper... i like it, heh... very slick as you said... thanks for this one, i never seen it anywhere under the download sites... -_-

GorbGuy · Guest

Another viable solution, is to build a firewall router. If you have a spare peecee laying around (and it doesn't have to be anything fancy at all, a pentium 133 is more than capable of doing this,) a couple of network cards (assuming you have cable or dsl,) and a fresh copy of suse linux or one of the BSD distros (both of which are free on the internet,) then you have everything you need to make a jazzy firewall/router. You can even get fancy, and put up your own DNS server to increase your web access times, install postfix to have your own email server, and install Apache and serve your own webpages. If this sounds interesting, drop me a note. I can pretty easily walk you through setting up something like this.

Y · Thu 06/05/03 2:50pm

http://www.looknstop.com/En/index2.htm

small is beautyfull

Maelstrom696969 · Thu 06/05/03 2:53pm

Man, Gorb, I hope you can get your own bizness goin' on bro.

ShadowCore · Great Deity Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 2833

Thanks Gorb, not the first time you helped me out.

And yes, I thought about that Firewall/web server thingie before, got a stand alone Linux web server start up disk for an old PC, but I still need to get around to getting a network card...not to mention the fact that I won't be here in two years anyway, so it'll all be useless then anyway. I'd rather do it when I get OUT of the house

_________________